Antigone Kourakou’s recent work reminds us of the inexhaustible capacity photography has to transmute reality. References to the history of photography abound and, working surreptitiously, they lead us to the threshold of a silent introspection, quite unexpected nowadays, when photographs targeting events and social issues urge us to judge, to think, to draw conclusions. In direct contrast to this condition, Kourakou’s photography prompts to imagine by stirring up deep-seated images and moments of our own lives.

The elliptical description of situations and persons in her photographs define moments whose completion requires our contribution. We need to restore perspective, to compose faces from lines and shapes, so as to, ultimately, discover the associative relationships that articulate the photographer’s personal style.

Kourakou directs by minimally drawing on reality – faces, gestures, branches, leaves, thick shadows – and recomposes an enigmatic world. Looking at her photographs, we come to realize that what lies at the core of her work is not so much what is happening when shooting as the shaping of a balance between reality and fantasy, a balance which is always in keeping with the dynamic composition of her frames.

Ideas became embodied in legendary figures and imaginative proposals, legendary today, capable of overcoming the ages and gaining authority until today. One had Antigone’s name and guarded the heart’s reasons by defending them against laws and against social bans, expressly declaring that the reasons for the sacred have their own dignity, as well as the diversity of thought and the absolute originality of the human person. Tormented has been such a dialectical, which still passes through the body and the story of women, but for this very reason has become an example of every struggle and every desire to escape from not wanting to grow or at least change. The photographic composition of the Artist recalls appropriately to the stage rhythms of the great Mediterranean theatricals where “odeon” was, in fact, a theater of civilization, nowadays all to be recovered.

Critical text written by the critic and historian of photography Pippo Pappalardo.

Antigone Kourakou is arts curators and restorer. The photograph is become one of this main activity in 2010. It’s for her a way to research and express a personal aesthetic meaning.

«The Shadow of Things»

When we look the photographs of Antigone Kourakou, we see fully all the range of the abstract photography. Although there is only some visual information, the photographs invite us inevitably at the interpretation. In her photographs, even if the subject is not shown in entire, the intention behind each subjects photographed stay mysterious. However, the details of the faces, the distant shape, the landscape or the closed spaces photographed from different point of view meet united in a concrete shape of a photographic approach.

The exhibition “The Shadow of Things” presented and can be visited on the digital platform of Ariadne Photo Gallery.

Looking at Antigone Kourakou’s photographs, one fully perceives the suggestive range of photographic abstraction. Although there is scarce visual information that connects the pictures with the real scenes, the situations, and the events they were born out of, the photographs imperatively call for our interpretation. They expect us to bring the ghosts back to reality, to rationalize the impossibilities they depict. The challenge is unrelenting, recurring and invariably leading to a dead end. And it is exactly this inability to explain them which lends them the poetic dimension that marks Kourakou’s work. In her photographs, even when depiction is complete, the intention to photograph this or the other subject remains unfathomable. Nevertheless, details of faces, remote figures, landscapes or indoor spaces shot from different angles are assimilated into a concrete form of photographic approach. Kourakou entered the field of photography totally unprepared, without having studied it, her only weapon being her unquenchable curiosity about the shadow of things, about ‘something other than reality’ that lurks in her subjects, and seems to be hiding behind the surface of their photographic representation. Without predefined rules or specific pursuits, the process of photographing things yields unanticipated aspects, which guide the photographer to an incessant quest of the unseen.